As the number of available television channels increases, traditional magazine and newspaper printed schedules become more difficult to publish and to use for identifying programs which may be of interest out of the thousands being broadcast over the next few days or so.
Selecting a program to watch would be difficult even if all of the programs were to be listed in the traditional magazines or newspapers by category. Various web sites also provide television schedules, program information, and search tools, but they are also difficult to use and do not allow selection based on prior viewing history and habits.
Wehmeyer, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,226, disclosed a television system in which information for programs which are to be transmitted in the future is transmitted in advance to form a channel guide listing, allowing searching for specific television programs which satisfy certain criteria concerning a user's viewing preferences and upon, successful conclusion of the search, a suggested program list is generated in order to predict for the viewer certain programs which may be of interest. The Wehmeyer, et al., apparatus stores historical information about the particular television shows which the user watches and uses it as search criteria, or the search criteria is editable by the viewer to further refine the searches.
According to Wehmeyer, et al., a list of predictions of television programs which the viewer might find interesting can be generated from program guide data corresponding to future programs which is broadcast combined with data corresponding to programs previously watched using the apparatus. According to Wehmeyer, et al., whenever a program is watched for a given period of time, for example, 5 minutes or more, the system keeps a record and thereby the viewing habits and preferences can be determined, which allows the system to predict which upcoming programs should be of interest to the users of the apparatus.
The Wehmeyer, et al., system is designed to predict programs which may be of interest regardless as to when the programs will be broadcast. The system may suggest a list of programs scheduled for broadcast at times which may be inconvenient to the viewer. Furthermore, the Wehmeyer, et al., system does not other capabilities which allow the user to have better control of the suggest feature.
In addition, one satellite TV provider in the U.S. is DIRECTV, which offers access to more than 225 channels in digital-quality picture and sound. The DirecTV system broadcasts a program schedule of over 7000 programs to be broadcast over the next 14 days. The characteristics of programs are included in the program schedule as well as during the broadcast of the programs themselves, and those characteristics are received and processed by DirecTV receiving systems at the user or viewer level. Some examples of the characteristics in the DirecTV system are currently in the format Topic_Theme as follows:
Movies_Action/Adventure
Movies_Comedy
Movies_Drama
Movies_Fantasy
Sports_Baseball
Sports_Basketball
Sports_Boxing
Interests_Animals
Interests_Arts
Interests_Aviation
Interests_Business/Financial
Lifestyles_Cooking
Lifestyles_Exercise/Fitness
Lifestyles_Fashion/Style
News_News (currently News is a pseudo theme and not a theme)
Themes_Action/Adventure
Themes_Comedy
Themes_Current Affair
Themes_Drama
Show Types_Award Ceremony
Show Types_Event
Show Types_Game Show
Show Types_Mini-Series
Show Types_Movie
Age Appropriates_Children
Age Appropriates_Family
Age Appropriates_Adult
The DirecTV system assigns Topic numbers which are used in the broadcast information and the receivers and also a relevancy number which usually is from 1 to 10 for each Topic_Theme characteristic in each program. Some programs have multiple Topic_Theme characteristics, each with possibly different associated relevancy numbers.
The DirecTV receiver system can accommodate up to a predetermined number of individual users for which user profiles are stored, for example ten. The guide data used by the system may be received from a satellite television communication system. The satellite amplifies and rebroadcasts this signal to a plurality of receivers located at the residences of consumers via transponders operating at specified frequencies and having given bandwidths. Such a system includes an uplink transmitting portion (earth to satellite), an earth-orbiting satellite receiving and transmitting unit, and a downlink portion (satellite to earth) including a receiver located at the user's residence. In a such a satellite system, the information necessary to select a given television program is not fixedly-programmed into each receiver but is rather is down-loaded from the satellite continually on each transponder. The television program selection information comprises a set of data known as a Advanced Program Guide (APG), which relates television program titles, their start and end times, a virtual channel number to be displayed to the user, and information allocating virtual channels to transponder frequencies and to a position in the time-multiplexed data stream transmitted by a particular transponder. In such a system, it is not possible to tune any channel until the first APG is received from the satellite, because the receiver (IRD, or Integrated Receiver Decoder) literally does not know where any channel is located, in terms of frequency and position (i.e. data time slot) within the data stream of any transponder.
An APG is preferably transmitted on all transponders with the television program video and audio data, and is repeated periodically, for example, every 2 seconds. The APG, once received, is maintained in a memory unit in the receiver, and updated periodically, for example every 30 minutes. Retention of the APG allows instantaneous television program selection because the necessary selection data are always available. If the APG were to be discarded after using it to select a television program, then a delay of at least two seconds would be incurred while a new program guide was acquired, before any further television program selections could be performed.
Once the channel transponder carrying a desired television program is tuned, the data packets containing the audio and video information for that program can be selected from the data stream received from the transponder by examining the data packets for the proper SCID (Service Component Identifier) 12 bit code. If the SCID of the currently received data packet matches the SCID of the desired television program as listed in the program guide, then the data packet is routed to the proper data processing sections of the receiver. If the SCID of a particular packet does not match the SCID of the desired television program as listed in the program guide, then that data packet is discarded.
The current DirecTV receiver system measures five minute viewing time periods and the relevancy factors for Topic_Themes, and increments each Topic_Theme weight counter in the user's profile by the relevancy factor corresponding to a Topic_Theme in the program being viewed. The Topic_Theme counters are incremented by the relevancy factors for each five minute time period as the period elapses or expires. The counters store [number of 5 minute periods] X [relevancy] product for each Topic_Theme combination at a Topic_Theme cell for a unique user. The resultant weights in the counters in a user's profile are used to calculate relative weights of all the programs in the program schedule when the user requests a list of suggested programs at the user interface.